What does the Jigsaw vote mean for Java 9? [Interview with Rémi Forax]

The clock is ticking: Although the EC didn’t approve the Public Review Ballot for JSR 376, the Jigsaw ship has not sailed yet. We caught up with Rémi Forax, a member of the Jigsaw expert group at JAX 2017 to chat about the impact of the vote on the state of Java 9 and the criticism surrounding Jigsaw.

Rémi Forax has been working on central projects of the Java platform for many years. In Java 7, he was instrumental in the development of the bytecode construct InvokeDynamic. In Java 8, it was the lambda expressions, in Java 9 he is one of the members of the expert group for JSR 376 — JPMS (Java Platform Module System).

In an interview with JAXenter editor Hartmut Schlosser, he gives insights into the current discussions within the Jigsaw expert group. He claims that the course has already been set for Jigsaw: Since the beginning of Java 8, the module system has become part of the JDK and many of the planned features for Java 10 are based on Jigsaw.

The module system will come – there is no way around!

Rémi Forax is a researcher and teacher at University Paris East Marne la Vallee. His area of research is the implementation of languages on top of runtime environment like the Java Virtual Machine. He is a father of 3, an OpenSource developer for several well-known projects, OpenJDK, ASM and some lesser known projects, and he is an expert for the Java Community Process, so he is one of the guys that have brought invokedynamic, the lambda (language + java.util) and recently the modules to Java.